The Pink Ghetto (23 page)

She gasped. “You talked to her?”

“Yup. Take a look at these and see what you think.”

“Wow, thanks!”

Her ecstatic reaction to having more work dumped on her was most gratifying. No wonder people wanted to climb the corporate ladder. Delegating was divine.

“W
here’ve you been?” Fleishman asked as soon as I came home.

I had stayed at work a little longer than usual, finishing the chick lit book about the fifty-year-old art student. Mercedes had already left a note on my desk telling me she wanted to see it ASAP. The next day I planned to run in, type up a memo recommending the book, and hand it over to her. It might just be the quickest turnaround in Candlelight history.

“I thought you’d be back an hour ago, at the most. I’ve been waiting to take you out to celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?” For the life of me, I couldn’t think of what there could be to celebrate. Especially between Fleishman and me.

“Your homecoming, for one thing,” he said.

“Right. Finding my way home after work was a great achievement.”

He shook his head in exasperation. “Not from work—from Dallas.”

I wasn’t kidding myself that my homecoming from anywhere was the reason behind his wanting to go out. Something else was afoot here. What could be going on in that feverish brain of his?

Maybe I was making it all too complicated. Could be he was just bored.
Maybe it’s just that Renata isn’t available tonight,
I thought bitterly.

I was none too eager to go out; I felt like collapsing. Fleishman would want to know all about Dallas, and what was I going to say? That I managed to make a spectacle of myself without his help? That his power of suggestion had sent me into the arms of Dan Weatherby?

The wounds of the weekend were still too fresh to laugh about them with friends. Especially Fleishman.

“I don’t know…” I said, looking longingly at the couch and the television. If ever there was a night for vegetation, this was it.

“Come on, you look fantastic.”

“I do?” This was hard to swallow, given how I felt.

But then of course, I was dressed in his mom’s Chanel suit. That’s probably all he saw.

Fleishman managed to convince me that I was outing-ready. When we left the apartment, though, I was so tired that I didn’t see the fat manila envelope stuffed under his arm. I didn’t notice it until we were seated at a Greek restaurant and he shoved it across the blue and white checkered cloth at me.

“There!” The word popped out of him. “You’re practically the first person I’ve shown it to!”

He seemed so excited, but I couldn’t help being a little stung by his qualifier. “Practically?” I asked. Before now, I had always been
the
first.

“I wanted it to be perfect before I gave it to you. You’re a pro now!”

I opened the envelope and pulled out a manuscript that was three hundred and fifty pages at least. Most plays clock in at a hundred and twenty, tops. “What is this,
Long Day’s Journey into the Next Millineum?
”

“That’s the big surprise. It’s not a play at all!” He paused, then announced, “It’s my first novel.”

“A romance novel?”

A shadow crossed his face. “Not a traditional romance novel. It’s a little hard to categorize…”

“You want me to read it as a friend?” I asked.

“Of course. But if you
do
think Candlelight would want to publish it…”

The words made me want to weep into my moussaka. It had been hard enough working myself up to reject a book written by a friend of the office receptionist. How was I going to deal with this?

“It’s sort of a romance from a male point of view,” he said.

“But our readers are women,” I pointed out.

“So?”

“So, they tend to like reading about the experiences of women.”

“That’s absurd.”

“No, it’s just natural. How many men do you know who rush out to see the latest Reese Witherspoon comedy, or nineteenth century costume flick?”

“I do,” he said, sounding offended.

It was true, he did. Then again, he also crashed romance conferences.

Of course, it was pointless to start arguing over a book I knew nothing about. “I haven’t read it yet, so…”

“No kidding!” he sniped. “You didn’t even look at the title yet, and I
agonized
over it.”

I looked down at the title page.

CUTTING LOOSE
A novel
by Jack Fleishman

“Jack?”

“It’s my pen name,” he said. “It’s better than my real name, I think. It’s more like a normal guy.”

Which he so wasn’t.

He leaned forward. “But what do you think about
Cutting Loose?
Don’t you think that’s catchy?” He was convinced enough of its catchiness not to wait for my answer. “I have tons of ideas for the cover. I imagine a woman and a man hanging in space—I don’t know, connected by a string of pearls, or a chain with a locket—and then a giant pair of scissors about to lop them apart.” He grinned. “Isn’t that good?”

“Great.” I was surprised he hadn’t already manufactured a mock cover.

“Naturally I’m thinking trade paperback, not mass market.”

“Naturally,” I said. “This
must
be good. I’ve never seen you so full of prunes about any project.”

“Do you think I would give it to you if it weren’t good? This could be a big book for you!”

I nodded. “I hope so.”

He leaned forward and cocked his head slightly. “You haven’t so much as leafed through the first page of that book.”

“I was going to read it tomorrow,” I said, “when I have time to give it my full attention.”

“Don’t you want to read just the first page?”

I didn’t, but he obviously wanted me to. And if I didn’t read it myself, he would probably start reading it to me. We’d be at Mykonos until dawn. Dutifully, I turned the cover page. The next sheet of paper was practically blank, except for one short line written in bold type.

For Rebecca Abbot, who inspired every line.

I felt a catch in my throat. Like the reluctant father who suddenly finds himself weeping when looking through the maternity ward window at the little bundle he’d helped create, I had to blink back tears. Fleishman and I had known each other for so long, but he had never publicly acknowledged that I meant anything special to him.

“What do you think?”

“Thank you,” I said. “No one’s dedicated anything to me before.”

“It’s true, you know. You’ll see how true it is when you read the book.”

I promised I would tomorrow. Now, of course, I was looking forward to it. Just by reading that one line I felt I had developed a personal stake in the success of
Cutting Loose.
Which actually was a pretty good title, I decided.

“Let’s have more wine,” Fleishman said, lifting his hand to catch a passing waiter. “In fact, let’s order a bottle. I feel like celebrating!”

The bottle was ordered and then consumed in short order, as we plotted out how our lives would change when Fleishman was a rich and famous author. Actually, it was his life he was plotting out, but I was piggybacking his prosperity every step of the way, even in his own reckoning. When he mentioned, say, the house in Tuscany he planned to buy when the royalties started streaming in, he would catch my uncertain gaze and add expansively, “You’ll love Italy! It’s the last place on earth where nobody worries about carbs.”

And then I would feel giggly and buoyant for another few minutes until the doubts would start crowding in. What would my role in Tuscany be? Houseguest? Visiting editor? Hangeron?

Would Renata be there?

Fleishman was in one of those festive, ecstatic moods of his, but it wasn’t what I would call a romantic evening. Nevertheless, doubts about my future attachment to Fleishman dwindled in direct proportion to the dwindling amount of wine in that bottle. Forgotten were my bitter feelings of the week before. Suddenly we were back in college again, and Fleish and I were going to take the world by storm, together.

It wasn’t until I was weaving home with Fleishman’s book under my arm that it occurred to my befogged mind that he hadn’t asked me much at all about my weekend, or about Dan.

Which, when all was said and done, was probably just as well.

Y
our first year in the city is for not doing all those New Yorky things you thought you would do before you lived there, like taking horse carriage rides in Central Park or riding the Staten Island Ferry. Our first New Year’s Eve Renata and I
didn’t
go see the ball drop in Times Square.

We had planned to. We had even passed on a perfectly good party because Renata was determined to do this crazy thing. She had bought champagne for us to stuff under our coats and little noise makers. “It’ll be so cool!”

“It will be so not cool,” I told her, when I thought I still had a prayer of wriggling out of this. “There will be thousands of tourists, crazy people, and Dick Clark enthusiasts. And they’ll all be drunk.”

“I know! How can you resist being a part of all that?”

Very easily. The truth was I didn’t want to go. Given my druthers, I would have gone to the party. “Plus, I think the operative word you’re looking for is
cold,”
I told her. “It’s going to be fricking cold.”

“You don’t want to go.” She started unwinding her muffler and unbuttoning her coat. She pulled a noisemaker out of her pocket and tossed it on the table. She looked crushed.

I felt so guilty. But why? Renata still clung to all these romantic notions about our being here together, but to me New York was like a gigantic playpen with exquisite women in it. I was twenty-three and ready to play.

But I still felt a tug from this woman I’d hauled back with me from college in Iowa. “Of course I want to go,” I lied. “I told you I did.”

“But you don’t want to.” She dropped down on the futon couch.

“C’mon,” I said, taking her hand.

She shook her head. “That’s okay. I don’t feel like going.”

“Renata…”

“It’s okay. We can stay here and watch it on television.”

Stay home?
I hadn’t planned on that. “Don’t you want to go to the party?” I asked.

“No.”

I sighed. I hated going places alone. I sank down on the couch next to her. She turned to me with those brown eyes of hers, full of tears. I could never handle it when she cried.

“If you really want to go that much, I’ll go,” I said.

“You idiot!” she said. “I don’t care about Times Square. I wanted to be with you—just us. Together.”

Together with all those drunken tourists? “Yeah, but—”

“Don’t you ever want that?”

Her hand was holding fast to mine now. She still had a seductive power over me every once in a while. For instance, that night she was wearing a black wool jersey dress that clung to her every curve in ways that I’m not sure she was even aware of. Or maybe she was. She leaned forward. Her lips were crimson and very enticing.

It
was
cold outside. And if I went to that party, who knew what would happen? This, at least, was a sure thing.

Did I sleep with Renata because it was twenty degrees outside and I just didn’t want to go to Times Square? Knowing that it was all over between us, did I take advantage of her because of my dislike of going to parties alone? Knowing it would cause all sorts of regrets in the morning, did I surrender to carnal pleasure simply because I was determined never to watch another
New Year’s Rockin’ Eve?

Not entirely. I was no longer in love with Renata, it was true. But I did sometimes feel nostalgic for her. And wasn’t that sort of what New Year’s Eve was all about?

What the hell,
I thought as I bent down to kiss her.
For Auld Lang Syne…

I
was just a wee bit hungover the next morning, so my trip to the office was interrupted with multiple stopovers for cures: A double espresso on the way to the subway. Excedrin at the Duane Reade. Two donuts with sprinkles—a little-known but surefire headache cure—from a cart on Forty-second. A super-tall-grande cappuccino from the coffee shop in our building. I waved to Rita on my way in and scurried quickly to my office. I had a feeling this was going to be a bear of a day to get through, and that was before I had sat down with my coffee, donuts, and Excedrin to peruse the first chapter of Fleishman’s book.

I re-read the dedication, savoring it, then began.
For a certain type of man—and I plead guilty to being that type to a T—Renata Abner was like catnip to a lean, hungry Siamese tom.

That first sentence stopped me cold. There was that name!
Renata.
I had been jealous of Renata ever since…but it turned out she wasn’t a real person, even.

Yet as I read a few more pages, I came to the scarifying conclusion that she actually was a real person. She was me.

She was so me, in fact, that anyone who knew me even in passing would not fail to miss it, even if they hadn’t read the dedication. Inspired every word? I could have dictated the thing. Fleishman hadn’t even bothered to change small details. And he had lifted conversations we’d had over the years verbatim. The more I read, the more furious I became. Those donuts didn’t last three minutes.

It was as if Fleishman had laid our lives out bare for all the world to see, like one of those guys on Seventh Avenue who sold pilfered goods set out on towels. My life was on the towel. Except he was only telling half the story. I became increasingly frustrated as I read, seeing myself reduced to a whiny former fat girl, a scolding jealous roommate, a clingy ex-girlfriend. The words stung all the more because there was a germ of truth in every paragraph—but it was as if he were staring at my personality through the bottom of a glass. The picture was distorted; I wasn’t really that person.

Was I?

I began composing angry rebuttals in my head. Then I would remember—this wasn’t a TV talk show
;
I wouldn’t be called upon to present my side of the story. There would be no public shouting match. This was fiction. It would live on, bare and unchallenged, to last as long as the paper this book was printed on.

I finished one chapter and then another, guzzling caffeine as I went. What I really needed was a Xanax. My heart was blub-dubbing so erratically I felt at times that I was going to keel over in my chair. I downed a trio of Excedrin in the vain hope of staving off the migraine I was sure was coming.

And then I came to the descriptions of our periodic and now long-lost sex life.

How could he? Okay, I liked the lights turned off. Was that so wrong? I wouldn’t call it a
mania.

I was so furious I thought I would have to stop reading. Instead, I kept on, possessed to see how much worse it could get. It was like a train wreck unfolding before my eyes; I was ghoulishly rubbernecking for blood spatters.

What made it all the more terrible was that I knew with each passing word that I wasn’t just reading a book; I was witnessing the very tag end of Fleishman and me. This wasn’t going to be something that we could recover from over a few bottles of Corona at Senor Enchilada’s. After years of pushing the boundaries, testing me, Fleishman had finally committed the unforgivable act.

The amazing thing was that in so doing, he made me see each argument, each slight, each snag that had ever occurred between us as unforgivable, too. Only I
had
forgiven him, and now I was being repaid for my foolishness. In spades.

How could he have done this?

And then to have had the chutzpah to
dedicate
it to me?

I spent three solid hours with that manuscript, and during that time it seemed that every single word of that book was branded onto my cerebrum. I read until every last syllable was painfully charred into place. I don’t have a photographic memory by any means; if you asked me to close my eyes and tell you what shirt I’m wearing at any moment, half the time I would draw a blank. Yet on that morning my brain seemed to have sprouted extra bandwidth to accommodate perfect recall of this outrage.

It was all there—tales from childhood, losing my virginity, my hang-ups. Did he think those things belonged to him? And there he was, too, poised as the knight in shining Armani, attempting to save me from myself. Helping me to move on. I think that’s what made me most sick. For a long time, I had wondered how was it Fleishman couldn’t notice that I was still secretly crazy about him. But the truth was, he did know. He’d known all along, and he’d loved it. I
had
been his entourage, as Wendy said. I had fed his ego.

And now I had provided him with a plot.

I was interrupted only once, by Mercedes’s assistant, Lisa, who poked her head in my door. “Mercedes has a few hours this afternoon. She wants to know if she could have the book you recommended to her in the ed meeting.”

I looked at the art teacher book. It was lying there, forgotten. “Just give me a little time to write up my notes,” I said.

She crooned a bar of “We Have All the Time in the World,” then closed my door.

I went back to fuming. And reading.

Finally I reached the end—the horrible end when the rascally adorable, rakishly handsome protagonist finally convinces the pathetic, cellulite-ridden ex-girlfriend to get her own life so he can live happily ever after with the gorgeous, glam record producer who had in the meantime fallen in love with him. (
Who was she?
I wondered, drumming my fingers angrily against my desk.) Fatso is finally cut loose, as the title suggests, and as a sop to readers she starts her own business with her chocolate chocolate chip cookie recipe.

Which was just so cliché, wasn’t it? Starting a business from a cookie recipe. How many movies had that been in? I mean,
come on.

And when did I ever bake cookies?
I thought defensively. Just once, and that had been at Fleishman’s suggestion. It hadn’t even been my recipe.

God, I was going nuts. I was debating a piece of fiction.

The most unbearable part of all this—and that was saying a lot, because it all seemed awful—was Fleishman’s assumption that I would be
happy
about all this. That I would abet this horrible book’s seeing the light of day by actually helping get it published. Did he really think I was that big a masochist?

An angry voice inside me countered,
Have you ever given him reason to doubt it?

I sat at my desk, basically catatonic except for the war-dance tattoo my pen was beating against my chair’s armrest, until what course of action I needed to take finally occurred to me. He wanted me to treat this book like I would any other manuscript? Fine. I would reject it like I would any other manuscript. I took out a large Post-it note, slapped it on the cover page, and tried to think of all the phrases I would use in the rejection letter, which I would savor writing. But all the anger seemed to have clogged my brain. The only phrase that came to mind was
No damn way!
And in fact, I started to scrawl this on the yellow sticky when there was a knock at my door.

It was Lindsay. She didn’t even wait for me to say come in, or to ask her to sit down. She just plopped down. Her expression was dazed—and surprisingly sad. “Did you hear?”

I put my pen down. “Hear what?”

“About Muriel,” she said. “No one’s supposed to know—only of course
everybody
knows.”

Everyone except me, evidently. I had forgotten about Muriel. She hadn’t been at work since I got back from Dallas. “I assumed she was sick or on vacation or something.”

“She’s in the hospital. In the
psych ward.
”

I frowned. I had always suspected there was a world of strangeness beneath that efficient manner and those Peter Pan collars. “What happened?”

“She tried to kill herself,” Lindsay said. “At least, that’s what her mother said. She lives with her mother, apparently. Did you know that?”

“No.” I really didn’t know anything about her.

“Hilary in human resources spoke to Muriel’s mom. She said Muriel had been
really depressed
since last week, and then something must have really driven her over the edge, because she OD’d on sleeping pills.”

Something must have really driven her over the edge…
That phrase made my blood freeze.

“I never thought she looked depressed, did you?” Lindsay asked.

Maybe I managed to shake my head, but suddenly I had trouble moving at all. A horrible certainty had taken hold of my brain. That awful book!
The Rancher and the Lady.
Could it have been Muriel’s?

Why had I not guessed?

I remembered sitting at my computer, pounding out a rejection letter that was probably the most callous thing I had ever sent to an author, ever. I might as well have scrawled
Loser, get out of my way
on one of my business cards and mailed it off. Every single word of that letter had probably seemed like a poison dart to Muriel.

I slipped down in my chair until I was slumped over in a perfect C-curve. Everything else—all my worries, angers, resentments—fell away from me and left me feeling nothing but pure guilt. I imagined Muriel sitting at that reception desk for nine hours every day, then going home to her parents’ house—how dismal was that?—to write
The Rancher and the Lady.
How long had it taken her. Months? Years?

And then she had picked
me,
personally, to read her work. And what had I done? Nothing. I’d just left her hanging. Agonizing. And then finally, brutally, I’d sent her a one-paragraph rejection.

Lindsay squinted at me. “Are you okay? You look pale.”

“What hospital is she at?”

She shrugged. “Somewhere in the Bronx, I think. Human resources was going to arrange to send her flowers, so you don’t have to worry about that. They’ll be sending around a card for everyone to sign this afternoon.”

A card. Wouldn’t that be great? And wouldn’t Muriel just love reading it? Especially when she got to my name—the name of her assassin.

My guilty conscience propelled me out of my chair and out the door.

“Hey, where are you going?” Lindsay yelled after my retreating back.

“The Bronx!”

Getting information was much easier than I had feared it would be. Once I told human resources I wanted to visit Muriel, they assumed that I must be one of her best friends at the office. Why else would I put myself out for a mere coworker?

I played along and got the name of the hospital from them—St. Felicity’s—then I headed for the elevator. On the way, Mercedes flagged me down. “Don’t forget that book,” she said.

I walked backwards a few steps so I wouldn’t have to stop. “It’s on my desk—I’ll get it to you ASAP.”

“Excellent!” she chimed.

I had no idea where I was going. The Bronx? It was just the great unknown at the top of the transit map, as mysterious to me as the vast arctic whiteness at the top of a globe. I had never been to a Yankees game, or to the zoo. None of Sylvie’s foodstuffs had required me to go farther north than Harlem, so there my travels had stopped. I had to ask a station booth attendant for directions, and then, because I never trust station booth attendants, I made her repeat them to me twice, which caused the line of people hurrying places on their lunch hours behind me to start grumbling in a way that sounded angry and moblike.

New York City is no place for the directionally clueless.

On the train, I hung glumly onto a strap even though there were miles of empty seats around me. Standing made me feel more like a penitent. I had no idea why I was going to see Muriel, or what I would say to her when I got there. I couldn’t take back a book rejection. I guess I just wanted to let her know that I wasn’t heartless. I wanted to start doing things right for once.

That booth clerk must have known what she was talking about, because St. Felicity’s was only a block away from the 210th Street station. I stopped at the gift shop next to the hospital cafeteria and charged the largest bouquet they had that wasn’t a funeral spray.

Then I found her room and crept quietly through the door.

Muriel looked up. I don’t know what I thought she was going to look like. I knew she wasn’t going to be in a padded cell. I guess I expected her to seem more depressed—maybe laid out in bed and hooked up to an IV drip of Valium. Instead, she was sitting in a chair by the window, reading a Candlelight romance. It was
Renegade Lover,
by Missy Martin, one of my authors. That detail made my heart sink even further.

She had on a flannel nightgown decorated with stripes of cabbage roses; over it was draped one of those crocheted bedjackets that at some point in the history of fashion normal women had actually worn. It was as anachronistic now as a bustle, but it made perfect sense that Muriel would not only have one but actually use it.

Her hair was pulled back neatly, and when she looked up, she even had her customary stripe of blue eye shadow in place. In the middle of a nervous breakdown, the woman refused to be untidy.

Her face lit up when she saw me. “Rebecca! What a surprise!”

I seeped all the way into the room. “Hey, Muriel,” I said. “Hope you don’t mind a visit.”

“Oh, no. I am so pleased to see you here.”

She was?
Belatedly, it occurred to me that if I were confined to a psych ward in the Bronx, the last thing I would be craving was a visit from a coworker.

“What beautiful flowers!” she exclaimed.